We generally refer to MarkLogic Server as an XML server, which is a special-purpose database management system (DBMS) for unstructured information.  This often sparks debate about the term “unstructured” and the information continuum in general.  Surprisingly, while both analysts and vendors frequently discuss the concept, the Wikipedia entry for information continuum is weak, and I couldn’t easily find a nice picture of it, so I decided to make my own.

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The Information Continuum and the Three Types of Subtly Semi-Structured Information

Now that we’re done with the stellar Mark Logic 2010 User Conference, it’s time to ask everyone to save the date for the MarkLogic 2011 User Conference which will be held at the wonderful Palace Hotel in San Francisco on 4/26 – 4/29/2011. Our current plan is to have pre-conference training on Tuesday 4/26.  The conference will be 2.5 days, starting Wednesday 4/27 in morning and going through Friday 4/29/2011.  On the afternoon of Friday 4/29, we’ll have a supplemental session for MarkLogic partners.  (Note that this format slides the conference back one day in terms of what day-of-the-week we do things; we’ve done that because 4/24 is Easter and we don’t want people to have to choose between traveling on Easter and missing the pre-conference training.) PLEASE MARK THESE DATES NOW IN YOUR CALENDAR .  You can always clear them later if you don’t want to come.

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Save The Date: MarkLogic 2011 User Conference

One MarkLogic tradition that I borrowed from Business Objects is the kickoff internal video contest.  You create a contest where any group or person can submit a short video on any topic they’d like … and then see what happens.  As an employee, I like these contests because the videos are typically quite funny.  As CEO, I like them because they reveal organizational culture and pathology.

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Norm Walsh XML Rock Star Video

After nearly six years at MarkLogic, we’ve decided to do a light refresh on our corporate identity, changing a few things The company name.  We changed this from Mark Logic (with a space) to MarkLogic with no space.  Previously, we had a subtle distinction where MarkLogic meant product and Mark Logic meant company. The logo.  The intent here was to promote the “Logic” in the logo.  The previous branding strategy was predicated on people calling the company Mark.  Hence the old logo had a big Mark and the little Logic.   In reality, people call us MarkLogic and we wanted a logo that reflected that. The color.  Marketing SVP Tracy Eiler brightened up the official MarkLogic red as a part of this process.

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Introducing the New MarkLogic Logo

We are very excited to announce the Sausalito XQuery Application Contest 2010. With this contest, we are looking for the best web application which has a significant part developed in XQuery with Sausalito. The contestant with the best application wins $7,500

Excerpt from:
[ANN] Sausalito XQuery Application Contest (win $7,
500)

I wrote a post last week sharing my first impressions of Foursquare , the much-hyped new Internet service that combines geolocation with social networking and elements of gaming.  Just as Facebook introduced core new concepts of “friends” and “status updates,” there is one core new concept in Foursquare: “checking in.”  When you arrive somewhere, you check-in to the location, announce to your Foursquare friends that you are there, and can optionally send a check-in announcement to your Facebook status feed. Checking in is a useful concept.  A GPS can’t tell if you are in the Tanuki Tavern on the ground floor of the Ganesvoort Hotel or the Plunge bar on top.  (To my knowledge, GPSs don’t do altitude.)  Nor, with 6 or so meter precision, can a GPS nail whether you are in The Brick Lane Curry House , Zerza, or Taj, all tucked tightly in a row on East 6th Street.

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Foursquare, Location Broadcasting, and Trust

I’ve heard so much hype about Foursquare that I had to give it a try, so I downloaded the Blackberry App and have been playing it with for a few days.  Here are my quick initial impressions: I give them an A+ for what I call “minimal implementation of core concept.”  Lots of startups have a core concept that needs rounding-out over time and they get confused about out how much core vs. how much rounding-out they should do in the first release.  I believe that for breakthrough products/services your first release should be all core, little round-out.  Foursquare implements this philosophy well:  this is about friends and their locations, period.  The app can’t even help you edit your profile picture (e.g., mine got all distorted), so I had to edit it myself on my PC and then re-upload it.  But that’s perfect.  Having a nice picture upload, crop, and edit function is precisely what you don’t want a location-based services startup focusing on.

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Quick Take on Foursquare

Here is a thought experiment, which is a model of OOXML and its dialects. I could have chosen ODF or HTML. When we talk about OOXML sometimes we mean one if its formal specifications, sometimes we mean a particular package format, sometimes we mean what an application can generate or consume

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A Sketch on Modeling Dialects of XML File Formats

I spent an hour or so browsing the QlikTech S-1 and thought I’d share some observations.  (See here for my prior post on the company.) The company has achieved good scale (2009 revenues of $157M) but growth has been decelerating from 82% in 2007 to 47% in 2008 to 33% in 2009. Gross margins are high at 89% due largely to normal margins on license (96%), unusually  high margins on support (96%), normal margins on consulting (27%), and a fairly small consulting business (10% of total revenues) which reduces the pull-down effect on the weighted average.  Wall Street will like this

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Thoughts on the Qlik Technologies (QlikTech) IPO

Could the administrator of the mailing list please delete this address ? thanks ! Dana Begin forwarded message: > From: http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk > Date: March 30, 2010 7:15:36 PM PDT > To: http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk > Subject: [ERR] from Where 2.0 > > Transmit Report: > > To: http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk, 2010/03/31 11:15:33, 452, This mailbox is > temporarily disabled.

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Fwd: [ERR] from Where 2.0